Do morphological traits of ground-dwelling ants respond to land use changes in a neotropical landscape?

Autor: Catalina Sanabria, Sébastien Barot, Steven J. Fonte, Florence Dubs
Přispěvatelé: Institut d'écologie et des sciences de l'environnement de Paris (iEES Paris ), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne - Paris 12 (UPEC UP12)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE), Technische Universität Munchen - Université Technique de Munich [Munich, Allemagne] (TUM), Department of Soil and Crop Sciences [Fort Collins], Colorado State University [Fort Collins] (CSU), Colombian Ministry of Agriculture., PDBCEX Conv.568, from Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovacion - COLCIEN-CIAS in Colombia., Ministry of Agriculture of the People's Republic of China
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Geoderma
Geoderma, Elsevier, 2022, 418, pp.115841. ⟨10.1016/j.geoderma.2022.115841⟩
ISSN: 0016-7061
1872-6259
Popis: International audience; Analyzing the impacts of agricultural activities on biodiversity requires a full knowledge of the ecology of the studied species. Using a trait-based approach may improve our ability to understand land use impacts on less well-studied species in order to establish general trends that will facilitate the prediction of these impacts. In this study, we applied a trait-based approach to understand the impact of land use change on ant communities in the Colombian Llanos region. Five common land uses were considered (annual crops, rubber plantations, oil palm plantations, improved pastures and semi-natural savannas) to test whether some morphological traits respond to soil properties and land uses. An RLQ analysis shows a significant common structure between species distribution, environmental factors, and morphological ant traits. This indicates that morphological traits could be used to predict the response of ant communities in different land uses since they respond to environmental characteristics as vegetation complexity, composition and management. Based on the selected morphological ant traits,three groups of land uses were differentiated: grazing-based systems, agroforestry plantations and annual crops. Agroforestry plantations, especially rubber plantations tend to host larger and specialized ant species, while grazing-based systems (i.e. improved pastures) mainly host small and generalist ants, and annual crops host more pigmented ants. These findings suggest that certain morphological traits can reflect the ability of ant species to settle down and survive in a given land use system. Our study shows that improving knowledge about trait-environment associations could be a useful way to better understand how ecological filtering shape neotropical ant communities and how they respond to landscape transformation and land use changes.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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